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Bitcoin and other Crypto Currency discussion thread

zanduh

Trash Compacter
Jan 15, 2018
51
38
I have this conspiracy theory that big data and social media is actually just the New World Order/Illuminati/Bilderbergers etc. inventorying and ranking every last human in terms of utility to the ongoing survival of the species/planet with a view towards culling the herd.

After careful consideration based on monitoring human behavior and merit displayed on aggregate social media platform data... the robot overlords have decided that humanity in its whole is worthless.
 
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Kmpkt

Innovation through Miniaturization
KMPKT
Feb 1, 2016
3,382
5,936
Just had a thought:

If GPU manufacturers want to control miner GPU purchasing volumes, couldn't they just do a non-editable firmware or hardware change to their products that makes cards non-functional over connections that are electrically less than PCIe x4? Nvidia already does exactly this by making SLI function at only x8 or above when Crossfire makes it obvious that an x4 connection can effectively manage this kind of parallelization between GPUs.

If I am not mistaken, forcing a PCIe 3.0 x4 minimum would leave gamers completely unaffected while breaking the functionality of the many x1 connections that miners currently rely on. At the very least, this would drive a broader assortment of hardware purchases as miners would require more motherboards, CPUs and RAM to run their rigs (good for the entire tech industry) while likely driving out enough miners to significantly reduce GPU demand.

Another angle is that for manufacturers like Zotac and EVGA that don't provide the other hardware that miners rely on (mining motherboards specifically) this could be a particularly good way to secure brand loyalty as the company that took significant action to help the gamers. By eliminating miner demand and thereby third party reselling of their cards for which they likely see no additional profit, their cards specifically would return back to MSRP moving an absolute TON of stock to their stable and long term customer base.

Alongside this, the manufacturers that want to produce cards for the admittedly riskier mining market could release mining-centric cards that allow x1 connections. Prices could reflect the current market as this is obviously what miners are willing to pay. Rather than allowing third party sellers to double the price of cards, the AIBs could simply price them very high to start with with the justification being that they require higher prices to produce cards for a riskier market. These inflated prices would in turn provide a large enough margin that GPU manufacturers could afford to be stuck with a bunch of spare GPUs if mining tanks. If mining continues to be strong quarter over quarter, this gamble would pay off massively for the companies that decided to take it.

Ultimately I feel like this would be a very simple way to get a lot of miners out of the gaming GPU market while deflecting the risks of producing additional cards for the mining market onto the miners themselves. Thoughts?
 
Last edited:

AleksandarK

/dev/null
May 14, 2017
703
774
Just had a thought:

If GPU manufacturers want to control miner GPU purchasing volumes, couldn't they just do a non-editable firmware or hardware change to their products that makes cards non-functional over connections that are electrically less than PCIe x4? Nvidia already does exactly this by making SLI function at only x8 or above when Crossfire makes it obvious that an x4 connection can effectively manage this kind of parallelization between GPUs.

If I am not mistaken, forcing a PCIe 3.0 x4 minimum would leave gamers completely unaffected while breaking the functionality of the many x1 connections that miners currently rely on. At the very least, this would drive a broader assortment of hardware purchases as miners would require more motherboards, CPUs and RAM to run their rigs (good for the entire tech industry) while likely driving out enough miners to significantly reduce GPU demand.

Another angle is that for manufacturers like Zotac and EVGA that don't provide the other hardware that miners rely on (mining motherboards specifically) this could be a particularly good way to secure brand loyalty as the company that took significant action to help the gamers. By eliminating miner demand and thereby third party reselling of their cards for which they likely see no additional profit, their cards specifically would return back to MSRP moving an absolute TON of stock to their stable and long term customer base.

Alongside this, the manufacturers that want to produce cards for the admittedly riskier mining market could release mining-centric cards that allow x1 connections. Prices could reflect the current market as this is obviously what miners are willing to pay. Rather than allowing third party sellers to double the price of cards, the AIBs could simply price them very high to start with with the justification being that they require higher prices to produce cards for a riskier market. These inflated prices would in turn provide a large enough margin that GPU manufacturers could afford to be stuck with a bunch of spare GPUs if mining tanks. If mining continues to be strong quarter over quarter, this gamble would pay off massively for the companies that decided to take it.

Ultimately I feel like this would be a very simple way to get a lot of miners out of the gaming GPU market while deflecting the risks of producing additional cards for the mining market onto the miners themselves. Thoughts?
This is good idea and would most certantly help gamers. x4 connection would allow the use of M.2 to PCIE x4 connectors for GPUs and sufficient bandwith. Especially the fact that current generation of GPUs dont saturate the whole x16 connector and the fact that PCIE 4.0 is near(meaning that if the next gen GPUs require more bandwitdh, the PCIE 4.0 at x4 speed would be enough)

But there is a better idea to be had. Just by cripling drivers on gaming GPU SKUs, both AMD and NVIDIA would have control over the situation. Like the way NVIDIA did limit the use of GeForce drivers in datacenter. A few tweaks to last 10 driver revisions would do the job, as miners couldn't return to previous version of a driver. I am sure that NVIDIA and AMD driver teams are capable to do it in a few weeks of time!
 

jØrd

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sudocide.dev
SFFn Staff
Gold Supporter
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Jul 19, 2015
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I guess the question is whats the point. Whats the incentive for either Nvidia or AMD to cripple miners, one way or the other its shifting a metric fuckton of their cards. Adored tech did a good piece on this not so long ago
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
5,948
4,953
Very true, although these cards are going to end up on the second-hand market once the bubble crashes and will deflate the brand value like there's no tomorrow. One could see this when the Radeon R9 290 was being dumped on masse for much less than €200 here while the R9 390 was going by almost double that. This means store and distributor stock doesn't move like it just did (100% within 24 hours) and manufacturers need to compensate for this problem.

There are a lot of cards in the hands of small-fry miners (1-20 GPUs) and the bigger fries (100+) which I wouldn't be surprised is about the same volume as all the gamers have in their PCs. If these hit the market when GPU mining is completely wasted, it will unsettle the market someway or another. Because these are going to be previous-gen or current-gen cards being sold at low prices.

This kind of news is also worrying: https://www.coindesk.com/coincheck-confirms-crypto-hack-loss-larger-than-mt-gox/
This seems to happen nearly every month up to a point we can't call this coincidences. I'd bet money (not crypto-currency :p) that this is all according to plan, selling stock right before a hack gets publicized and have the whales become even whalier. It's because of this that I can't trust wallet vaults when they're being mobbed constantly like in the 1900's.
 

grumpyrobin

Airflow Optimizer
May 11, 2017
260
190
The thing is that new hard forks/ easy to mine coins come out all the time...I am not well versed enough to see the future but I can't help but think that the mining bubble won't burst for a while....

At the very least..if there was a coin that would be mined by both cpu and gpu and bottleneck multi gpu that way I think it would solve the shortages in the future.
 

jØrd

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sudocide.dev
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if there was a coin that would be mined by both cpu and gpu and bottleneck multi gpu that way I think it would solve the shortages in the future.
Wouldn't you just move the shortages? At this point it becomes viable to mine w/ a fuckton of something like the up board that was being talked about in another thread here w/ an mPCIe -> PCIe adapter. Artificially gimping your coin so it cant be mined by a multi GPU machine just means you have to duplicate more of the hardware to mine in parallel.
 

grumpyrobin

Airflow Optimizer
May 11, 2017
260
190
Wouldn't you just move the shortages? At this point it becomes viable to mine w/ a fuckton of something like the up board that was being talked about in another thread here w/ an mPCIe -> PCIe adapter. Artificially gimping your coin so it cant be mined by a multi GPU machine just means you have to duplicate more of the hardware to mine in parallel.
If you need to duplicate more of the hardware the cost to mine more increase much more.
It's an incentive to have a gaming rig that works as a miner when not gaming.
 

jØrd

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sudocide.dev
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If you need to duplicate more of the hardware the cost to mine more increase much more.
Perhaps, SBC's w/ mPCIe arent that expensive and id wager if it were the only way to mine $hotCoin in bulk then product would be developed pretty quickly to try and take advantage of the new market. Whilst this is strictly hypothetical i doubt the RoI would be bad enough to save us from GPU shortages.
 

grumpyrobin

Airflow Optimizer
May 11, 2017
260
190
If you need to duplicate more of the hardware the cost to mine more increase much more.
It's an incentive to have a gaming rig that works as a miner when not gaming.
Perhaps, SBC's w/ mPCIe arent that expensive and id wager if it were the only way to mine $hotCoin in bulk then product would be developed pretty quickly to try and take advantage of the new market. Whilst this is strictly hypothetical i doubt the RoI would be bad enough to save us from GPU shortages.

Oh yeah sorry. I know what you mean now.
I meant, I should be more explicit.

Not just a simple gimp.
First it gimps so single gpu and single cpu are required.
Then it should actually have a hybrid proof of work code that requires half of it to be processed by the gpu and the other half to be processed by the cpu. If this is possible without leaving room for workarounds I do not know.

Also, you would have to make it so a better GPU scales with a better higher clocked /core count/ ipc CPU. So it encourages a balanced build.

TLDR

The point of all this is to have Miner Needs=Gamer Needs.
As a joke I would call this the proof-of-communist

It might have very interesting implications such as datacenters not being viable, and because the value of a gaming rig increases, the opportunity cost to go for a gaming rig over consoles is also lessened, hence more pc gamers. <-2 months later some1 comes up with a console based coin.

But yeah...just some idea from me.
 

Kmpkt

Innovation through Miniaturization
KMPKT
Feb 1, 2016
3,382
5,936
IMO they'd only need to apply these changes going forward. In fact, I'd be happier if they did because if the miner rollout were after the gamer rollout there would probably be a massive surge in prices for used last gen cards as miners clambered to get more stock during the time that they couldn't purchase and effectively use the new gen GPUs (yay making twice what we paid for RX 5XX and GTX 10XX).
 

EdZ

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
1,578
2,107
although these cards are going to end up on the second-hand market once the bubble crashes
I think GPU manufacturers have been hedging their bets against the bubble popping for the last year or so (and avoiding ramping up production to reduce the 'wave of cheap cards' effect), and are possibly starting to switch over to the idea that it's not going to go away any time soon. It does give an avenue for selling off low-binned GPUs though, so could lead to larger and more ambitious dies in the knowledge that a higher defect rate can be tolerated.
 

Phuncz

Lord of the Boards
SFFn Staff
May 9, 2015
5,948
4,953
The thing is that new hard forks/ easy to mine coins come out all the time.
But does that remain viable ? I mean, people are just investing money (straight or through mining) into a just made-up coin where most of them are just about short-trading on the market if I'm understanding it correctly. It seems most people investing in these zero-day coins don't know this is not another BitCoin, because everyone wants to convert these to BitCoin in the end. The value is also very much inflated because at the point that coin isn't selling anymore, it's basically worthless. Or that's how I perceive this. But I consider how people jump from coin to coin trying to cash in quickly, this will mean a lot of small bubbles before the big bubble bursts.
 

zovc

King of Cable Management
Jan 5, 2017
852
603
My understanding (coming from a Gamer's Nexus video which I wasn't paying 100% attention to) of how mining wears GPUs is that it's generally not an issue. In super hardcore factory settings, it's possible that power components get damaged (heat, sketchy risers), but in those cases your card will either work or not. It's not like your GTX 1060 is going to run at 50% (or 90%, or whatever) of what it should because it was used for mining.
 
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EdZ

Virtual Realist
May 11, 2015
1,578
2,107
My understanding (coming from a Gamer's Nexus video which I wasn't paying 100% attention to) of how mining wears GPUs is that it's generally not an issue. In super hardcore factory settings, it's possible that power components get damaged (heat, sketchy risers), but in those cases your card will either work or not. It's not like your GTX 1060 is going to run at 50% (or 90%, or whatever) of what it should because it was used for mining.
Exactly. There's nothing on a GPU that can 'wear down', either it works or it's dead.

As far as I am aware, not a single test has shown any evidence of performance degradation over time (due to mining or anything else) in GPUs, once the variable of drying thermal paste is removed.
 
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